


if you let my soul out, it will come right back to you

by frominfinitieswithin



Series: every kingdom [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Mentions of past abuse, Missing Scenes, Political Jon Snow, R Plus L Equals J, Season 8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:21:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24058897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frominfinitieswithin/pseuds/frominfinitieswithin
Summary: “What is it that you think is going to happen exactly? Do you think you’ll just go south and help Daenerys take the throne and that will be the end of it? You think she’ll just let you traipse back up to Winterfell, when all is said and done?”He stares back at her, offering only silence, and she sees the muscles of his jaw twitch, as he looks down at the snow.“And even if she does, do you think you’ll just come back as Warden and the lords will accept you? Do you think you’ll just come back and crawl back into my bed and everything will be as it was before?”or the third part of every kingdom, a season 8 au parentage reveal
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Series: every kingdom [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1699615
Comments: 12
Kudos: 137





	if you let my soul out, it will come right back to you

**Author's Note:**

> well, I meant to wrap up my every kingdom series and then accidentally wrote 12k words! here’s a few things before reading:
> 
> 1) Time jump from last fic so basically the long night happened between that one and this one 
> 
> 2) Jon’s hands in Sansa’s hair must be some sort of kink of mine bc it’s mentioned in all three of these fics - something about that mental image is just so hot
> 
> 3) Apologies for the lack of Arya in this fic, she's one of my favorite characters, but I don't have a great handle on writing her voice yet
> 
> 4) this can technically be read alone, but it would certainly be helpful to read parts one and two

When she loses her breakfast for the third morning in a row, she knows.

After all, she’s been here before, before the winds of winter had arrived to fulfill their promise, and she’d been named a Bolton rather than a Stark. She’d lost that babe early on, awakening one morning to red between her thighs and a sharp ache in her abdomen and a prayer of thanks to the Seven escaping from her lips in a frantic whisper. 

She remembers having little reason to thank them after Ramsay was told about the loss, his blade extra sharp against her back in the moons that followed.

Now, Sansa dry heaves over her chamber pot and wipes at her mouth with a shaky hand, rising slowly to walk over to the basin nearby. Her hands still shake, as she attempts to splash some water in her face, and she squeezes her eyes shut in an attempt to remember when the last time she had her moon blood was.

Outside the window of her chambers, the plumes from the funeral pyres paint the skies of Winterfell grey, and though the Long Night ended days ago, the smoke still settles over the castle like a wool blanket on a cold, winter night. The wolf pin that usually lines her breast is missing from her dress now, having turned to ash along with Theon Greyjoy, where she had laid him to rest after the battle.

She’s tired of grief, tired of mourning the people she loves, she finds, and yet it remains her constant companion, even after death itself has just been defeated, only days before.

From outside her chamber door, she hears Brienne knock hesitantly. “My lady, is everything alright? Are you ill?” the lady knight asks, voice filled with concern.

Sansa clears her throat before answering, voice shaking slightly, “Everything is fine, Brienne. My breakfast just didn’t agree with me, that’s all.”

There’s a beat of silence before Brienne calls through the door. “Would you like me to call for some ginger for you?” 

“No, thank you, I think I’ll see the maester before I head to the Great Hall,” Sansa responds, her voice sounding thin, even to her own ears.

Without thinking, she ghosts her hand across her abdomen, her fingers catching in the leather straps of her armor. If her suspicions are correct, then she should see Maester Wolkan the moment she leaves her chambers, unable to make any moves or decisions without confirming with him first. 

The fact that she hasn’t truly spoken to Jon since the feast, their moment on the ramparts the last time they had been alone together, is not lost on her. Avoiding each other had been easy, the preparations before the battle pulling them in completely different directions of the castle, and the ongoing plans for the rebuilding of the castle completely consuming every moment of Sansa’s time every day since. 

The war to the south still looms over them like a coming storm and Daenerys remains an even bigger chasm between them, the relationship between her and Jon still settling like a pit at the bottom of her stomach.

Jon hadn’t left Daenerys’s side, save for a trip down to the crypts before the battle, and despite his promise to Sansa on the ramparts, jealousy still pulses between her ribs, burning more and more fiercely when she remembers that he’d ended the previous night in Daenerys’s chambers.

There had still been much to discuss still, their argument from earlier having barely been settled, before Davos had found them. There was the fact that they had _lived_ , that they had survived to see the dawn - that Arya had saved them all. That their pack had survived and a time for spring would come again, lingering at the edge of a winter that would fail to outlive them.

There is the fact that soon Daenerys Targaryen would seek to take King’s Landing, either by an unlikely surrender of the throne by Cersei or with fire and blood, just as her house’s words had always promised. 

There is the fact that she will not do it without taking Jon with her.

And now there is this—this secret that grows inside of Sansa, the one that could destroy them all, if Cersei doesn’t get the chance first. 

_It’s what we deserve,_ she thinks, as she adjusts the chain around her neck before moving to leave her chambers. They’d made so many mistakes since leaving Winterfell for the first time, it was the first thing they’d agreed upon when she’d met him at Castle Black so long ago, but this was their gravest one yet, the kind of mistake that could upend kingdoms. 

The consequences of the truth about Cersei and Jaime and the children shared between them had plunged all seven of the kingdoms into a war that still had no end in sight and that had only been the beginning.

It had meant the end of a legacy of lions and the fall of a house of stags and so much more.

The consequences of the truth had meant their father’s head.

Her stomach turns again at the thought of Cersei and whispers of _little dove_ and _stupid girl_ grow louder in the back of her head, the memory of the stifling heat of the Red Keep making her skin prickle with goosebumps. If she closes her eyes she can picture the golden goblet of wine Cersei always had in hand, lions ornately carved along its rim. She can picture her own self timidly meeting Cersei’s gaze over the rim of that wretched goblet many, many times, filled with a silent kind of rage, all aimed at a woman who was her captor, but also a woman whose altar she worshipped at all the same.

_You almost sound like you admire her._

Yes, she had a lot of reasons to admire Cersei, had learned many a valuable lesson from her during her time in King’s Landing, but this was a lesson she’d never hoped to retain —

Never this.

  
  


The walk to the Maester’s chambers is a familiar one, as Sansa walks down the hallway, with Brienne at her back. When she’d been married to Ramsay, she’d made it often, Roose Bolton’s presence at her side then bringing her none of the comfort that Brienne offers now. Even now that she rules the castle, she can still detect the glint of pity in Wolkan’s eye when he looks at her over ledgers and ravenscrolls each day. 

He’s seen every scar on her skin as a fresh cut, knows every inch of violence that Ramsay inflicted on her body, almost as well as she does. He’s seen her shame, up close and personal, and though he had never offered her more than a curt nod during his frequent inspections of her, he’d held her hand, as her body had expelled the rest of the dead babe on that cold autumn morning so long ago. 

“My lady,” he greets when she enters, standing from behind his desk as Sansa approaches. “Are you well this morning?”

On the desk, in front of her, is a tidy stack of scrolls that had come in over the past few days, after news of the defeat of the Night King had spread across Westeros. Sansa’s gaze flickers briefly over the papers and she makes a mental note to find time to go over them on her own, before pulling her eyes back up to meet the maester’s.

“Yes—actually no,” she starts then stops, sitting down before the maester. She works her palm with the thumb of her opposite hand, trying to think carefully of the right words to say. “There’s something I need you to confirm for me.”

“Of course, my lady. I’ll do the best I can with the knowledge I have.”

Sansa places her hands atop the desk, in an attempt to stop them from fidgeting, tenting them in front of her mouth and raking her eyes over the maester’s face. “I need you to confirm whether or not I’m with child.”

Wolkan’s eyes glance over her form across from him, lingering on her stomach for a fraction longer. “Have you bled, my lady?”

“Not for some time, no. And I’ve had trouble keeping my breakfast down recently.” Sansa clasps her hands tightly in unease in front of her, as she delivers the admission.

There are a hundred more questions behind Wolkan’s eyes, Sansa can tell by the way he hesitates before replying to her, but he holds them to himself and for that, she is grateful.

“If it pleases you, follow me to the table and I’ll be able to see if there’s a babe,” the maester answers, moving swiftly from behind his desk and over to the long, wooden table positioned at a slight incline in the corner of the room, close to a tall rack of herbs and remedies. 

Sansa walks over to the table and moves to lie back, hiking up her skirts in the process, as Wolkan seats himself near the edge where the heels of her boots rest, and she pulls her smallclothes down. It’s a familiar dance for the two of them, she thinks, a humorless laugh nearly escaping past her lips at the thought. She spreads her legs and braces herself for the feeling of cold fingers at the apex of her thighs, her hands clenching at her skirts in anticipation.

(After all, she’s been here before.)

Maester Wolkan’s fingers move up towards her abdomen and press lightly, probing around the entire area with intent focus. He continues the motion for a moment longer before gently pulling down her lifted skirts and resuming his place in the chair across from her.

“You may sit upright if you like, my lady,” he offers and she doesn’t need to hear what he’s going to say to confirm what she already knows. The look he gives her, as she brings herself to a seated position, lined with that familiar glint of pity, already tells Sansa everything she needs to know.

“I would say you’re a few moons along now, with mayhaps six or seven more until the delivery,” Wolkan continues, his tone regretful and somber and it hangs unspoken between them, the fact that Bolton rule or not, the Lady of Winterfell being with child is no cause for celebration right now.

Sansa swallows tightly, glancing out the small window on the other side of the chamber, and her eyes follow the unmistakable grey smog of smoke billowing past it. “How quickly can you brew moon tea?”

Wolkan blinks back at her, brows furrowed, almost as if he’s unsure he’s heard her correctly. 

“My lady...taking moon tea at this stage could be very dangerous, not just for the babe, but for you as well.” He shakes his head slightly before continuing, “I wouldn’t recommend it—“

“How _long_?” Sansa cuts across sharply, turning back to face Wolkan, as she interrupts his warnings. She’s played out every possible scenario, played out every possible outcome in her head, and she doesn’t have to look very far ahead to know that keeping this child cannot ever be one of them.

“Nightfall, perhaps—tomorrow before you break your fast, at the very latest,” he responds, a hesitance lining his tone. He pulls his gaze from hers and stands, walking over to the rack of herbs behind Sansa and considers a handful of them carefully, before removing them from the shelf and offering them to her. “These are some roots that will help settle your stomach. In the meantime.”

The silence in the room feels suffocating, as she stretches her arm out to take the herbs.

“Thank you,” she answers, almost in a whisper, tracing her fingers along the ridges and grooves of the ginger root. She’s not ashamed, not of the way she’s chosen to handle the situation she’s found herself in, but Maester Wolkan’s eyes are still hard to meet, as she gathers herself to leave the room. 

“I’m sure this goes without saying,” Sansa suggests, turning back to face the maester, with one hand on the chamber door handle. “But I trust you’ll choose to exercise discretion about this, Maester Wolkan.”

“Of course, my lady.” He offers her his usual curt nod and she’s headed out the door just as soon, Brienne falling into step behind her as she exits. Her steps are slow and deliberate, like the breaths she keeps trying to take, and yet the stone walls still feel like they’re closing in on her. There’s a tightness in Sansa’s chest threatening to crawl its way up her throat and she clutches at her stomach, trying to quell the feeling of panic beginning to rise within her. 

Sansa halts her footsteps suddenly, gripping at the wall to the right of her, her fingers clutching at the stone. She turns towards the wall, her forehead bracing against the cold feel of it and a devastating sob wracks her entire body, deep from within her, her breath catching in her throat. 

Tears that had been threatening to fall since she’d crawled her way out of the crypts only days before, to meet the light of dawn—since she’d seen dead Starks rise and seen Rickon with eyes bluer than ice—begin to fall freely now and she raises a trembling hand to wipe fervently at her cheeks.

(If the cut that runs across her palm from where she’d gripped the dragon glass so, so tightly catches against her skin, she ignores the sensation.)

Brienne, she finds, is nothing like the companion Roose Bolton was at all, as she feels her lady knight’s arms wrap around her from behind, enveloping her in a strong, fierce hug. The air in the hallway is quiet, save for Sansa’s quiet sobs and the light crackle of the lanterns lining the castle walls. 

The steady feel of Brienne’s arms keep her from collapsing into the heap her body so desperately wants to crumple into and she inhales deeply, taking the moment to collect herself and turn to look at the knight with a watery smile. 

“Come, Brienne. We’re already late to meet with the lords,” she sighs out, already pulling her face back into the steel mask she’s found herself having to employ more and more as of late. A look of distress flashes across Brienne’s face, but Sansa doesn’t give her the chance to say anything, turning on her heel and heading back towards the end of the hallway.

Whatever it is she might say, Sansa wouldn’t be able to hear it, wouldn’t be able to listen to her kind words of sympathy without tasting the guilt she’s felt, since the minute Jon walked out of her chambers all those moons ago, at the back of her throat. 

He finds her in the godswood.

It feels like years have passed, since it’s been just the two of them in one place, but everything feels like that now, the defeat of the Night King splitting the world into a cruel before and after. The exhaustion that drapes Jon’s body feels like it will live in his bones forever, and yet his blood thrums with what he’s been keeping to himself for days.

What he’s been keeping from Sansa for days. 

He’s not her brother anymore—he never was, it turns out, and he doesn’t know what to do with that. He doesn’t know how to reconcile years of craving and wishing and wanting to be a true Stark with the truth of this dragon blood of his. 

He’d attributed his desires for his sister to his death and resurrection, had made peace with the sentiment that coming back from the dead might make a person come back wrong, but he realizes now that it had been the Targaryen blood pulsing through his veins that had made him wrong all along.

The realization sinks in quickly and sharply, much like the knives of his brothers had into his chest when they’d deemed him a traitor. 

_Before._

Now, he is Aegon Targaryen and he is the heir to the Iron Throne. 

_After._

The thought disgusts him more than anything, as he thinks of everything that’s happened since that fateful day in the Tower of Joy. Rhaegar and Lyanna chose themselves over all of the Seven Kingdoms and they’d all lost so much because of it.

Because of the secrets that Ned had helped to keep, even up until the day that he’d lost his head. 

He’s tried to be angry at his father, tried every day since Sam told him the truth and upended everything he’s built his entire world upon, but all he’s managed is a poor imitation of resentment, that constant yearning for Ned’s approval taking priority _still,_ even though he had been long dead for years now.

Even though he had lied to him all this time.

Jon pushes the thought down and walks past the frozen pond towards copper hair, always a beacon of light, even in the heaviest of storms.

“I thought I might find you here,” he says softly, his footsteps coming to a halt only a few paces behind where Sansa stands in front of the heart tree. 

She startles at the sound of his voice, turning her head sharply to meet the source of her surprise. Tully blue eyes search over his face and he can feel her catalog every new cut and scrape on his face, can feel her take in every inch of him where Jon stands in front of her. There’s concern in the look she gives him, but there’s something else too, something a lot like the look of betrayal she’d given him when he’d first arrived back in Winterfell with Daenerys Targaryen on his arm.

“Shouldn’t you be preparing to leave for King’s Landing?” she questions flatly, pressing her lips into a tight frown and clasping her gloved hands in front of her.

He bristles at the coolness of her tone, but keeps his own gentle in response. “Aye, I should be. But I needed to speak to you first.”

Snow falls, cascading gently and slowly from above, adding a light dusting of snow to the existing snowfall in the godswood. Flakes catch in her hair and he flexes his hand, clenching and unclenching it into a fist, resisting the urge to brush the snow from the crown of her head and tuck the stray strand of hair back behind her ear.

 _It cannot happen again,_ the words of his Hand echoing in the back of his skull.

She scoffs, huffing out her reply, “Oh, is it now that you want to speak to me? In the council meeting, it seemed like Daenerys’s thoughts and opinions were your sole focus.”

Jon shakes his head, wiping a hand over his mouth and taking a step closer to her, reaching for the crook of her elbow. “Look, I’m sorry about that—you know I’m sorry about that—but I need you to listen to me, I need to—”

“No, you don’t get to tell me to listen. Not when I’ve barely seen more than five minutes of you alone since Davos stumbled upon you trying to fuck me on the battlements—not when you’re still spending all your nights in _her_ bed doing gods knows what,” Sansa interjects sharply, bracing back from him and moving to turn back towards the entrance of the godswood.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jon growls back, grabbing her arm to turn her back around towards him. The fight with Daenerys from the night before burns in his brain and the fear that has been festering since he’d shared his parentage with her starts to rear its ugly head, his other hand moving down to grip tightly and desperately at Sansa’s waist.

“Don’t touch me,” Sansa spits out, recoiling from him in a half-hearted effort. She turns her head away and clenches her jaw, trying to quell the tears threatening to fall at the corners of her eyes.

“Sansa,” he breathes out, trying to pull her that much closer to him. Those delicate, fine-boned hands brace upon his chest and she pushes against him, keeping her head turned from his still. His grey eyes search for hers, these eyes that were supposed to prove just how much Stark he did have in him, and he tries to find the courage to tell her the one thing that might save them, the one thing that might bring them peace.

(And if they let it, it might even bring them salvation.)

“Let go of me, Jon,” she grits out between clenched teeth, as she pushes off the hand that grips at her waist. Despite her ire, her body leans into his own, almost subconsciously, as if it’s never even had a choice in the matter. “We’re not doing this again—we can’t do this again.”

He presses even closer to her, bringing one hand up to cradle her face and the other to rest at the hollow of her throat. Bracing his forehead against her temple, Jon soothingly brushes a thumb against the porcelain feel of her cheekbone, back and forth across the pale expanse of skin.

“Nothing has changed,” he whispers into the small space between them, his lips barely brushing her cheek.

Oh, but everything has changed, and he doesn’t dwell on the fact that he speaks the lie more for himself than he does so for her.

A wry laugh breaks from her, suddenly, as she pushes him away, with more assertion this time. “You think _I_ have no idea what I’m talking about? What is it that you think is going to happen exactly? Do you think you’ll just go south and help Daenerys take the throne and that will be the end of it? You think she’ll just let you traipse back up to Winterfell, when all is said and done?”

He stares back at her, offering only silence, and she sees the muscles of his jaw twitch, as he looks down at the snow. 

“And even if she does, do you think you’ll just come back as Warden and the lords will accept you? Do you think you’ll just come back and crawl back into my bed and everything will be as it was before?”

At this, his eyes lift from the ground and back to hers, and there’s something like longing there, underneath the hurt and betrayal and anger that he knows she feels.

“Tell me, Jon, do you think the lords would ever accept that?” she presses on, her chest heaving, and he doesn’t miss the slight break in her voice at the end of her last question.

They’re only an arm's length apart, so close that Jon would barely have to extend his arm to pull her back into his orbit, but that white-hot anger that he’s so used to riling up in her emanates from her now, so he keeps his distance. He lets the void between them grow, as if they stand on opposite ends of the battlefields outside the castle. 

Jon lets her push him away because it’s what they’ve always done, the dance they’ve learned the steps to over and over again, the way their relationship has always ebbed and flowed—she pushes and he pulls. 

Pulls her back from the brink and back to him, back to Winterfell and back to home.

Constant and everlasting, like the roots of the weirwood tree.

“Sansa,” he sighs out, her name whispered reverently like a prayer, and he reaches for her wrist, slowly as if she’s a wounded bird. Her skin feels soft under his gloved hand where he strokes the inside of her wrist, near the pulsepoint, and he rests his fingers there for a moment, letting himself feel the gentle throb—the pulse of her heartbeat and the rush of blood underneath her skin. 

He’s tired of fighting, has been for so long now, and all he wants is to be _still_ , here with her for just a moment, before he has to armor back up and do it all again. To his surprise, she doesn’t protest when he raises her wrist to press a chaste kiss to the inside of it, where his fingers had just been, and he commits the taste of the skin there to memory, like he’s done with every other part of her.

Jon pulls her towards him, the distance between them lessening until it no longer exists, her light footfalls tentative in the snow as she approaches, and he kisses her then. His lips graze lightly over hers, and Sansa presses her mouth firmly up into his, meeting it with a kiss hard enough to bruise.

He opens his mouth to her and Sansa’s tongue is slick when he takes it with his own, tasting the inside of her mouth and eliciting a moan from her. Words were never a strong suit of his, not like they are of Sansa’s. Even as King, she had been his trusted mouthpiece, both when he needed her to be and especially when he hadn't wanted her to be.

But here, here where her hands tightly grasp the straps of his jerkin and he groans into her mouth, he tells her everything he’s never been able to say, the kiss acting as a plea and a confession all at once. Her fingers wind through the hair at the nape of his neck and he closes his eyes against the sensation of her delicate fingers against his skin. 

“Jon, stop,” she tells him, voice sounding breathless when she pulls from him suddenly, a broken-sounding sob threatening to escape past her red, swollen lips. 

“I don’t want you going down there—I can’t watch you march south to your death, like I watched Father and Robb do,” she continues, voice barely a whisper above the wind. “How are you not consumed with worry at what lies ahead? How are you not worried about what she might do?”

“Of course, I’m worried about what lies ahead! I worry about what lies ahead all the time—about what it means for the North, what it means for the people in this castle, what it means for Bran and Arya and…” he trails off, all the initial anger leaving his voice at the mention of his siblings. 

(Former siblings, a dark voice in the back of his head reminds him.)

 _What it means for you,_ he does not say, but the haunted stare Sansa gives him tells him that she’s registered the implication nonetheless.

“I know, alright? I know that Daenerys is a problem, but you can’t tell me that you still don’t see that we needed her to get to where we are now. We needed every single man in her armies and each of her dragons and—“

She gives that haughty scoff again, pulling her wrist from his grip and shaking her head. “Gods, you still don’t get it, do you?”

And off they go, resuming the dance, that treacherous push and pull that will surely take them over the edge now. That white-hot anger that he’d been so careful to avoid flares within himself and suddenly he needs her to listen to him, needs her to hear the words he’s been so carefully crafting in the back of his head for the past two days. “No, _you’re_ the one who doesn’t get it, Sansa. I have to tell you some—”

“I’m with child.” 

She snarls the admission at him and the sound of her voice pierces through the quiet of the godswood, startling him into silence just the same. 

Jon jolts back from her, as if he’s been burned, and his mouth hangs agape, opening and closing several times before finally resolving to stay closed. A look of anguish passes over his face and suddenly he’s that young boy again, sitting at the edge of the Great Hall, as the rest of his siblings sit at the head table with their parents and he fights waves of resentment in the pit of his stomach, as he looks on.

Behind them, the red leaves of the heart tree rustle gently in the northern winds and he thinks back to the last time he was here. Down on his knees, dedicated to becoming a man of the Night’s Watch, his vows just as much a part of him then as the Stark blood his father had promised before he’d left for the Wall. 

He thinks back to a late night, clandestine visit to the brothel in Winter Town in their youth, Robb and Theon on either side of him, both boys trying to outdo each other with false confidences and bravado, Jon the quiet medium between them.

He thinks back to his reluctance to couple with the woman who had been at his disposal, how her red hair had shone in the candlelight of the small chamber. He hadn’t wanted to put a bastard on her, hadn’t wanted to damn a child to a fate even more bleak than his own.

Maybe it’s fitting, after everything that’s happened, that he’s saved the worst parts of himself for his lady sister. This lady sister of his that he was somehow always destined to ruin. 

_You were right, Lady Catelyn. I’ve done all the horrible things you always thought I would do. Usurped your true born sons, had my wicked way with your porcelain daughter._

He swallows thickly at the realization, and he could choke on it, if he lets himself truly think of everything they’ve lost in order for him to be where he is now. For him to have been a king and then somehow nothing, all over again, with the dragon queen threatening to bring the entire world to heel with a promise of fire and blood.

And despite the fact that he may be Sansa’s cousin now, the babe that grows within her was put there long before that fact had been uttered aloud by anyone.

Sansa takes a step back from him and turns away, widening the gap between them and leaving him with a view of only her profile. One of her fists is clenched tightly in her skirts, as she smooths them, and he again fights the urge to reach for it, to raise it to his lips and kiss the tension away. Across from him, she draws deep, shaky inhales amidst the cold air, a flicker of regret flashing across her face momentarily, but when she turns to face towards him, any shadows of uncertainty that had been there before are now gone. 

“We’re in far more danger than you could ever even imagine,” she whispers, with a surety that sets a chill to his spine, and with that she turns, fleeing from the godswood, leaving nothing but footprints in her wake, as she runs back towards the castle. 

  
  


Flames paint Sansa’s face with shadowy hues of orange and yellow, where she stares into the fire by the hearth, the heat from it radiating through the entirety of her solar. Ghost rests beside her and she presses her face to his warm white fur, like she used to do with Lady, hoping to find a semblance of familiar comfort there. 

The wolf releases a content growl, thumping his tail against the hearth, and she lets her eyes drift closed, feeling the warmth from the fire and Ghost’s fur spread across her entire body. The chill from the godswood still clings to her skin and she feels goosebumps start to form where her blood has begun to warm.

The image of the look on Jon’s face burns brightly behind her eyelids, and she feels her stomach churn with remorse, at the way she had abruptly informed him of the babe. She’d lanced the confession at him like a javelin, intending to maim him—to pierce him where it might hurt him the most—and though it had brought her a brief moment of satisfaction, it does nothing but eat away at her now.

(Sansa finds she has no choice, but to aim all her anger at Jon, because to do anything but means she’ll only have herself left to be angry with.)

If she’s not angry with Jon, then there will only be her own choices to consider— because it’s the choices they’ve made that have gotten them to this place, isn’t it? 

She had promised herself she was done with making all the wrong choices, after she’d escaped from the lion’s den, after she’d crawled free from the clutches of the flayers of men, but promises are a fickle thing, even when we’ve made them to ourselves, and this is a fact she’s learned the hard way. 

Her hand glows in the light of the fire, all pale and alabaster skin, as she extends it closer to the flame, with her other hand remaining clenched in Ghost’s fur, and she’s struck, suddenly, with the memory of being here before. The memory of Jon’s hesitant knock at her door, the uncertain expression lining his face, the tremble of her hands and the desperation in her voice when she’d begged him not to leave for Dragonstone. 

The memory of his gaze lingering on her mouth for what felt like a lifetime before his lips had crashed messily and violently onto her own. 

_“I don’t want to fight with you anymore.”_ Jon had choked out, with his mouth hovering over hers, her body wedged tightly between his hips and the desk behind her. 

They’d been playing this game for moons now, had been playing it since they’d left the Wall behind them. A game in which they’d tiptoed along the lines of propriety, seeing how close to the edge they could get before falling down, down, down but with the way Jon had panted against her mouth, the way his body had thrummed against hers, they had found themselves far past falling.

She thinks back on the way he’d braced her against the desk, lifted her from beneath her thighs and hoisted her atop it, spilling wells of ink and knocking over piles of scrolls in the process, hands roaming everywhere before settling on her waist. Jon’s touch had felt like fire, searing hot and burning, and she had been tired of being cold—been tired of the deepest parts of her being made solely of ice and steel. 

She’d let her body arch into his, almost on instinct, as he’d pressed open mouthed kisses down the column of her throat, running his tongue sloppily down the length of it, the slight catch of his teeth in the hollow of her throat causing her breath to hitch.

She’d let his groans fill her mouth while she had tugged at the laces of his breeches, palming at the hard flesh there, and pulling a moan from him when she’d finally gotten the length of him in her grip. 

_“Fuck, Sansa.”_ He had whispered, his head falling to her shoulder and the hand curling around her waist had gripped her even tighter, promising to leave bruises in the morning, while she had stroked along his length, the feel of him heavy in her hand. 

She pulls in a deep inhale, breathing in the woody scent of the fire in front of her, as she remembers Jon’s searing kisses, how he had gripped her face so hard it had almost hurt, how he had rucked her skirts up past her hips and slipped two fingers inside her tight heat, the feel of him dipping between her wet folds making her to gasp into his mouth.

His hips had been bracketed by her thighs, as he had mouthed at her breasts through the wool of her dress, his teeth grazing taut nipples, as the head of his cock had pressed against her and he’d hiked her thighs higher and higher against his waist, before sliding into her in one, fluid movement. 

He had stayed stone still for a single, paralyzing moment, his forehead braced against her own, his mouth breathing in the same air as hers, the thickness of him stretching her with an intoxicating burn before he had begun to move inside her.

_“Gods, you feel—fuck, Sansa.”_

It had been the most alive she had felt since taking back their home, the closest she’d felt to any one person since leaving Winterfell so long ago, and she had only gripped at Jon’s back harder as he had slammed into her again and again, a steady, punishing rhythm that had made her moans reverberate around the room. 

She’d only rocked into him harder when his thrusts had become more frantic and her head had fallen back, a cry of pleasure ripped from her throat, with his face buried in her neck, muttering what could only be described as filth along the skin at her neck. 

_“Don’t go.”_ She had breathed out when she had felt him stiffen, his hand wound tightly in her hair and her name on his lips like a litany.

 _Don’t go,_ she had begged, when she’d come down from her own orgasm and felt his seed paint her thigh, as he’d slipped from inside her and pulled away suddenly, turning away from her to face the other side of the chamber.

It hadn’t taken more than a few moments for the shame to set in, sharp and pungent and ripe between them, and it had only served to amplify the silence of the room, save for the rough sounds of them trying to gather their breath in the aftermath.

Jon hadn’t been able to meet her gaze as he had quickly re-tied the laces of his breeches and he’d only offered her a fleeting, pained look before turning on his heel and fleeing from her room.

(He was gone as quickly as he had come, but she’d felt the burning imprint of his touch on her skin long after he’d waved to her over his shoulder the next morning, leaving the North in her hands, but leaving her alone all the same.)

 _I wish Jon were here,_ she can hear in her own voice, and she fights to stamp the familiar feeling out, to smother it down, just as she is so easily able with every other emotion she feels, with every other person in her life.

A knock at the door startles Sansa from the memory and she turns towards the source of the sound, beckoning, who from the sound of the voice on the other side of the door, must be Brienne to come in. Ghost raises onto his haunches, suddenly alert, and she reaches down to again run her hand through the white tufts of fur, comforting the wolf, as she stands from where she’d been seated on the furs by the hearth.

“Lady Sansa,” the lady knight greets with her usual tact when she steps through the threshold. There’s a small linen bundle in her hands and Sansa feels some of the tension that’s been building in her spine release, like a breath she didn’t know she was holding in. “Maester Wolkan wanted me to bring this to you personally.”

A small smile graces her mouth and she extends her hand to take the parcel from Brienne, not quite meeting her eyes when she does so. “Thank you, Brienne. You’re free to take leave for the night and send Alaric, if you wish.”

It was only now, since Brienne had been in her service, that the knight would allow anyone else to stand guard outside Sansa’s chambers, having only entrusted two Mormont guards to rotate shifts with her upon occasion. 

Sansa suspects it’s Jamie Lannister’s presence in the castle that occupies her trusted protector’s time.

Brienne lingers near the doorway, slightly hesitant, and Sansa doesn’t miss the way her eyes pause on the bundle still clutched tightly in Sansa’s fist momentarily, before she responds. “My lady, forgive me but I must ask. Moon tea?”

Sansa looks down at the linen package in her hands and turns it over, and the weight of it feels ironically light, for the gravity of what she’s about to do. Ironically light, for the weight of the guilt she feels when her blue eyes raise to lock with Brienne’s. It would be easier, she thinks, if Brienne’s tone wasn’t so gentle, so concerned, and so like her mother’s had always been when Sansa had felt the most scared in her youth. If the look on her face wasn’t filled with an unsettling worry and her mouth wasn’t downturned in a frown, illustrating her internal disquiet at whether or not to offer Sansa counsel.

When they’d been on their tour of the North, to rally support against the Boltons, the scars Ramsay had left her with had been unbearable, some having been barely healed since she had made that fateful jump from the top of the battlements. The pumice Edd had given her during her stay at the Wall had been the only thing keeping them from rendering open again in the dry, Northern air and though her back had been the most scar-riddled part of her body, the part of her body that Ramsay had most loved to use as his own personal canvas, she hadn’t been able to find it within herself to ask the lady knight for aid in applying it there.

She had stood by the mouth of her tent so many nights back then, Brienne standing guard on the other side, with the balm in her hand and the request on the tip of her tongue, but she’d swallowed it down each and every time. 

Every time she remembered how they’d crossed paths long before Brienne had saved her in the woods, how she had brushed her off and chosen to remain tangled in Littlefinger’s web of lies, until she herself had been consumed by them. 

The moment had replayed on a loop, over and over in her head, her own special brand of punishment that even Ramsay couldn’t mete out, when she had been left alone with only her thoughts for far too long.

 _Sometimes we don’t have a choice_ , Brienne had told her, when Sansa had challenged her presence at Joffrey’s wedding. 

“It’s nothing, Brienne,” she assures, and she almost believes herself, given the steadiness of her tone. She wonders when it became so easy to lie, to present this masked version of herself shrouded in half-truths and omissions to the world with practiced ease. “I promise everything is fine. Or at least it will be.”

She clutches the sachet of herbs even more tightly in her fist, unconsciously and without thinking, but the motion does not go unnoticed. Brienne’s eyes lower down towards her hand again, but they linger only for a moment, before she’s bowing her head in a curt nod in Sansa’s direction.

“Goodnight, Lady Sansa. Sleep well,” Brienne says, her hand on the door handle. Her tone is soft, something tender laced with something firm, and Sansa stares at the spot where she just stood, long after Brienne has closed the door behind her.

 _And sometimes we do,_ Sansa had responded, probably feeling clever at the time, probably reveling in the power of being able to tell someone ‘no’ for the first time in a long time.

Sometimes we do, she thinks, as she unfurls the contents of the linen bundle into the empty cup resting on her desk, adding hot water to the herbs and allowing them to steep for a moment. There’s a slight tremble to her hands when Sansa eventually raises the tea cup to her lips, and something catches in her throat, when she realizes that she’s scared. 

Scared of what is yet to come—scared of what could have been and what will never be.

But then she tightens her grip on the handle of the cup, steeling herself and knocks it back in one swell, swallowing the hot brew and all the mistakes and wrong decisions they’ve made along the way down with it.

Sometimes we do have a choice—

And so she makes hers.

  
  


Jon watches the last of Daenerys’s retinue depart from the council room, Grey Worm closing the door behind him as they exit the room. The map of Westeros, that has become as familiar as the back of his hand, lays spread out in front of him and various sigils and blocks are scattered across the paper, near where King’s Landing is marked. He absentmindedly runs his fingers over the wolf figurehead, thoughts lingering on the thousands of men they’d lost just days ago, the men who’d fought and bled for the North and would have kept fighting, if they’d been given the chance.

If he lets them, his thoughts will wander to an even darker place, a place where he holds the dragon sigil in his hand instead of its wolf counterpart. 

They would depart for King’s Landing in a matter of days, according to Daenerys, the final decision being less of a suggestion and more of a demand in the end. She’d been opposed by nearly everyone including her own, but the beat of dragons’ wings above them has always had the capacity to silence dissention.

Davos stands to his right side, his pensive eyes surveying the map in front of them with intense focus, while Brienne and Podrick stand across from them at the table, an equally concentrated gaze written across both of their faces. Next to them, Arya stands with her head slightly cocked, arms placed behind her back and Needle sheathed trustily at her side, raking her own eyes over the map as well. 

Sansa stands next to her, grasping the edge of the table with a white-knuckle grip and hardly looking down at the map, but resolutely not looking at him. She hasn’t spared him a single glance since she’d swept into the council room with Brienne, the last to join him and Daenerys and her advisors to discuss the battle ahead. She looks ill, he thinks, when he looks up and takes in the sheen of sweat lining her brow and the way her skin is almost a ghostly white, as if all the color has been drained from her. The way she grips the table, as if without its support, she’ll collapse into a heap on the ground.

His thoughts wander immediately to the child she’s currently carrying, _his_ child that she’s currently carrying, and his stomach turns at how careless he’s been. With her, with their kingdom, with everything they’ve built. Even after all this time, even after making mistake after mistake, so many that they had killed him in the end, he’s found he has yet to stop making them.

(And if Sansa is to be considered a mistake, then he knows he will never be able to.)

“Are you alright, Lady Sansa?” The sound of his Hand’s voice breaks the tense silence of the room and pulls Jon from his thoughts to look back up at her, alarmed at the question. 

Across from him, Sansa draws deep shaky breaths, still holding the table with a death-like grip, and her arms buckle under the pressure of trying to hold herself up. Brienne and Arya rush over to either side of her, both holding her around the waist in an effort to keep her standing upright, before Jon has the chance to reach the other side of the round table. 

“I’m fine, I’m just—” She pauses and takes another deep breath before continuing, one arm wrapped tightly around her middle. “I just need to lie down, that’s all.”

“You’re bleeding,” Arya gasps sharply, looking down at the front of Sansa’s dress, her dark brows furrowed. A dark red stain spreads across the wool of Sansa’s dress, just below her waist, and Jon’s stomach churns at the sight of the blood. It’s not the look or the ripe, copper smell of the blood that makes him queasy, but rather _where_ the blood is coming from and how much of it there seems to be.

“You need to see the maester. Now.” He croaks out the command, panic evident in his voice, and finally, finally her eyes catch on his. The cold, hard stare she’d had to offer him before is gone, replaced by something much like fear. Something like the need she used to have in her eyes when she would burrow under his furs at Castle Black come nightfall, her nightmares plaguing her even long after she’d escaped from Winterfell.

It all happens so quickly, from Brienne diligently gathering Sansa into her arms and bolting out the door of the council room, to the mad frenzy of Arya running to fetch the Maester and gather bandages and new sets of linens, once they’d arrived at Sansa’s chambers. Jon crouches down on his haunches, outside the chamber door, trying to erase the image of the trail of blood that had followed when Brienne had carried Sansa’s limp form from the room out of his mind. There isn’t anything to do now but wait. So he does, as he watches guards carry a hot bath into the room and watches Brienne carry Sansa’s soiled dress, in a neat, folded pile from the chamber in one hand. 

His throat tightens, at how bloodied the shift that is bunched in her other fist is, the white lace stained with amber streaks of red. 

He’d never even had a chance to discuss the babe with Sansa, never even had the chance to tell her the truth about his parentage, the impending journey to King’s Landing overshadowing almost everything in their lives—Daenerys widening the chasm between them with each passing day. Now, she’s likely losing the child that was never supposed to be shared between them and there is nothing he can do, while he sits with his back against the stone wall, awaiting any semblance of news.

Guilt, much like death, is a companion he has learned to live with by now. Learned to embrace like an old childhood friend, like a second skin that fits perfectly, no matter how much time has passed between them.

Eventually, after what feels like moons, Podrick exits the chamber, an anxious and regretful look passing over his features, before he clears his throat and speaks. “Your Grace,” he starts, giving an almost imperceptible nod in Jon’s direction. The urge to correct him is on the tip of Jon’s tongue, to tell him he’s not a king any longer, but he swallows it down, more desperate for news of Sansa’s status instead. “You can enter now, if you’d like.”

He thanks him, giving his best attempt at a grateful smile that feels more like a grimace, before slipping past the door, and he’s met with Sansa lying slightly upright in a reclined position on the large feather bed of the Lord’s Chamber. The pallor of her skin is still a sickly white and there’s a grey tinge to her usually pink lips and cheeks. To his surprise, she’s awake, with Brienne seated at her side refilling a metal jug with cold water. He watches Sansa drink greedily when the knight brings a cup of it to her lips, her hand braced behind Sansa’s neck in support. Near the hearth, Arya and Maester Wolkan throw blood-soaked sheets into the fire, no words passing between them, as they discard the linens into the flames. His presence goes unnoticed as he enters, and he hesitates in the doorway, unsure if it will be welcomed.

“Leave us,” he says, after a moment, his Northern brogue low and assertive, cutting across the laborious silence of the room. His eyes never leave Sansa, the movement in the room becoming background noise, as he moves towards the bed. 

“No.” Arya turns from where she’s been standing at the mantle of the fireplace and faces Jon, her hand alighting on Needle’s pommel and her face hardening, with the way it glares at him now. The sound causes him to pause, halting his footsteps on his path to Sansa’s bedside. Her brow is cocked in challenge, her gaze cutting, and Jon recognizes what it looks like when someone is prepared to attack, prepared to fight for their own.

Arya has no way of knowing what happened between them before he left for Dragonstone, has no way of knowing that he’s responsible for the babe that Sansa’s just lost, and yet the look she gives him from across the room is all too knowing. He sees her fight something like revulsion in the shadows of her face when she looks at him, and it’s gutting, to think how much he has disappointed her in the few days since they’ve been reunited at Winterfell. 

(One sister after the other, one mistake at a time.)

“Arya,” Sansa breathes out weakly. “Please...give us a moment. Brienne, Maester, you as well.”

Arya holds his gaze, her dark grey eyes locking on his own and leaving him feeling hot with shame, before they flick back to Sansa’s form on the bed. A look passes between Sansa and Arya, a quiet challenge between the two in a language that only they will ever understand, and then Arya is bolting from the room, Brienne and the maester directly at her back. The silence between him and Sansa is broken only by the sound of the door closing behind Maester Wolkan and he seats himself in the chair Brienne has just occupied at the side of her bed, unsure of how to even begin. Unsure of how to fix everything he’s broken, how to turn back time to make it so they never leave Winterfell, even if it means a world where he never gets to feel the bow of her lips beneath his own or feel the way her body arches against his, like it was always meant to mold to him.

Sansa straightens against the headboard of the bed, attempting to push herself into a more upright position, but he pushes her back gently, making her relax against the gathering of pillows behind her. He takes a deep breath, resting his elbows upon his knees when he sits back, and he stares at her evenly, grey eyes searching the sharp Tully features before him. She has been his constant for so long, there for his Winterfell of before and his Winterfell of after, but everything hangs in the balance now, and he has no inkling of where that leaves them.

“What happened?’ he questions breathlessly, gliding a hand over his mouth, closing his eyes as the words leave his mouth. It’s obvious what's happened, but he needs to hear the words from her own mouth, needs to know all the other things still unspoken between them since she’d run from him in the godswood. 

She keeps her gaze trained on the furs nestled around her, her fist clenched tightly within them, and he sees her worry the inside of her lip with her teeth, the look behind her eyes distant and remote.

She swallows tightly, turning towards Jon, her hands clasping together in her lap. “I took moon tea. Maester Wolkan said it might be too dangerous—that I might be too far along, but I took it regardless. “

He gives a woeful nod and feels the anxiety building in his chest, as he thinks of his own secrets still to be relayed.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he asks, voice low and subdued. He looks to her, the pained expression lining his face reflected back at him in Sansa’s.

“You left for Dragonstone and you barely said goodbye. You left me here alone and you barely even thought to write, you barely thought to send a single raven, except to tell me that you’d bent the knee all of a sudden.” Sansa works her palm with the thumb of her other hand, a storm of emotions passing over her face, as she gathers her words. “When I realized I was with child, I could hardly tell you about it in writing. And when you came back with Daenerys and the dead were on our doorstep, there just wasn’t any time to tell you.”

“We didn’t get any time,” she adds in a regretful whisper, and he knows that she speaks of more than just the time they’d lost while he was away at Dragonstone. She speaks of times when they’d simply been cohabitants of the same castle in their youth, rather than siblings, moving past each other like two ships in the night. She speaks of times when he’d become more than her brother, when they were the only Starks in Winterfell, the last two of their pack. 

“I didn’t know how to face you when I left. After what we did.” Jon exhales the admission, looking down at the stone ground beneath him, hands loosely clasped between his knees. “Every time I put a quill to paper, the words were lost. There wasn’t anything I could say to make amends for what I’d done to you.”

“You didn’t do this _to_ me,” she rebuts with a slight shake of her head, frustration lining her tone.“Every wrong choice you made, I made alongside you.”

A beat of silence passes between them. He lifts his eyes back to her slowly, carefully.

“Come here,” he tells her, beckoning her towards him and pressing a kiss to her forehead, like he’d done on the ramparts all that time ago, when all she had been to him at the time was a shadow of her lady mother and the only hope for a family he used to have, once Winterfell had been theirs again. “I’m so sorry, Sansa. I’m so, _so_ sorry I wasn’t here.”

“I made the choice I had to make to keep us safe,” Sansa says, pulling away from him and resting back against the pillows behind her, her pale face lined with exhaustion. “King in the North or not, you’re my brother. Carrying your child was never an option.”

The pit that has been growing in his stomach sinks even deeper and it’s now or never, he realizes, for him to tell her everything he’s been holding back for days now. He steels himself and grabs her hand, taking the effort to do so gently, given her current, delicate state.

He pulls in a deep breath. In and out, and his chest quakes with trepidation. 

“I’m not your brother.”

Her brows furrow and a look of confusion passes over her face, her head giving another disbelieving nod. “Jon, we’ve been over this before, you’re a Stark through and—”

“No, I’m really not. Sam came to me before the Long Night,” he interrupts, bracing his elbows against the bed as he speaks, needing to continue, needing to get everything out in the open once and for all. “He read something, when he was at the Citadel, about our aunt Lyanna and Rhaegar Targaryen officiating their marriage before the Seven. They were married and they had a son before Rhaeger was killed at the Trident. Before Lyanna bled to death on her birthing bed.”

“That’s not possible,” she stammers back, the hesitantancy of her tone betraying her uncertainty. “He kidnapped her. He raped her. It’s the entire reason why Robert Baratheon went to war—it’s why Father went with him.”

“He didn’t.” He flits his grey eyes towards hers, trying to convey a truth to her that he hardly wants to believe himself. “Rhaegar loved her. And she loved him, apparently.”

“What are you trying to say?” Sansa snaps, the question feeling more like an accusation than anything else. Her posture is suddenly rigid against the pillows and she’s pulling her hand from his grip suddenly. 

(He mourns the loss of the warmth of it in his hand before she has even fully pulled away.)

“I’m their son, Sansa. Ned Stark isn’t my father—he never was.” The confession burns in the back of his throat and it tastes like ashes in his mouth, when he says it aloud. His fingers curl against his thigh and he turns his head towards the window, staring through the frost-lined panes and wishing he could tell her anything else than the words that leave his mouth now. 

Outside, his eyes track the still-billowing smoke from the funeral pyres contrasting against the blue of the sky, its presence lingering about the castle, much like the deaths that had inspired it. It rises against the fall of the snow from above and the two are nearly indiscernible, from where Jon can see.

She looks away from him, bowing her head down towards her lap and shaking it fervently. “No. You _are_ my brother. And you’re Arya’s and Bran’s and Rickon’s and Robb’s.” What sounds like a sob threatens to bubble past her throat, but she smothers it down, her thumb pressing even harder into her opposing palm and his eyes do not miss the motion.

“Bran saw it,” Jon tells her. “However it is that he sees the things that he sees, he saw Lyanna give birth to me. He saw Ned take me from her arms and bring me back to Winterfell.”

“If what you’re saying is true, then it means that…” Sansa trails off, looking at him as if she’s just truly seen him for the first time. “It means that you’re…” Her sentence goes unfinished and the silence between them grows more stifling with every minute that passes.

“It means that I’m the heir to the Iron Throne,” he laments quietly, gaze still fixed on the window across from the room.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, someone had once said, and with each crown that has been placed upon his head, he finds that all he wants is to be the bastard of Winterfell once more, his only duty being to live up to failure, when that was all he had been known as.

“Who else knows this?” Her voice is still a hoarse whisper and his eyes flicker back to hers to find the blue of them shining with a sheen of unshed tears.

“You. And Daenerys,” he answers, studying her face carefully for a reaction at the name. “I have to tell Arya still, but I wanted to tell you first. I _needed_ to tell you first.”

“You can’t go to King’s Landing with her.” The shaky quality to her voice is still there, but she sounds stronger, more sure, when she shoots back the response quickly. 

A sigh leaves him and he reaches for her hand again, her fingers intertwining with his almost of their own accord. An ache grows in his chest, lodges itself somewhere between his ribs and spreads throughout his lungs, a visceral kind of ache. “I can’t stay here, Sansa.”

At first, when he’d learned of his true parentage, under all the anger and the betrayal and the hurt, there had been a glimmer of relief. Relief that maybe the biggest skeleton in his closet didn’t have to live there after all, that he wasn’t as depraved as he thought he was when his thoughts would drift to his former sister. 

But that had faded all too quickly, upon the realization that even though his Targaryen blood and name was meant to give him everything he never had, it would take the one thing he had always been able to call his. 

Winterfell. 

Home.

Her grip on his hand tightens. “Jon, if you’re the one thing that stands between her and the Iron Throne, then she will choose the throne,” Sansa replies. “Your claim is stronger than hers, she has no reason to keep you alive once she kills Cersei. She will kill you too, and she won’t blink twice before she does it.”

“I don’t care about the bloody Throne, I don’t want it. I’ve told her that over and over.“

“And when has anyone ever cared about what we want, Jon?” she asks, desperation clearly etched on her face and laced throughout her voice. “What makes you think there will even be a choice in the end?”

“Please, don’t do this,” she begs softly, taking the hand intertwined with her own and raising it to her lips, pressing his knuckles firmly to them. “Please, please don’t go.”

“I have to do this, Sansa. She risked her life to keep us all alive. She risked half her army to help the North because of the promise I made her. I can’t go back on that now.”

The words ring familiar to him and it’s a place they’ve been before, an argument they’ve had so many times he’s lost count of its winners and losers. They both know, deep down inside, that it’s a lost cause, that he will choose honor at the end of the day and Sansa will choose duty. They’ll resume the same roles they always play, as if it’s a script they’ve rehearsed dozens of times, and in the end he’ll still leave, bound by the same honor that had taken their father’s head, the same honor that’s shaped him into the Northern fool he remains now.

He wonders when the small graces of honor will start to counterbalance the costs.

His hand slips from hers, lifting to cradle her face, his thumb lingering on her cheek and his fingers winding loosely in her copper tresses. Sansa leans into his touch, pressing a soft kiss to the inside of his palm, and he brushes at the tears that linger at her cheeks. He would spend his whole life trying to ease her pain, he imagines, if that’s what she needed. “You said it yourself, that the lords would never accept it. I can’t stay in Winterfell and rule the North, not without any claim to it. I’m not a Stark, Sansa.”

“You are to me,” she whispers, and he can feel it all over again, the taste of her skin beneath his lips when he’d grazed them across her forehead. The feel of the snow catching in his hair and the news of winter just beyond them, on the horizon. “You’re always going to be.”

She reaches for him and Jon lets Sansa tug him into her, lets her pull him under the furs where she rests, settling into the space she’s created for him near the edge of the bed. She curls into him, much like she used to in his bed at Castle Black. It’s different now though, the way her head pillows against his chest, rather than the way she used to grasp at his back, with her head nestled between his shoulder blades. A small fist bunches at his chest and his heart beats thunderously beneath where her head is pressed against it. They slot together like two puzzle pieces, his lips braced to her forehead once more. 

She has always fit seamlessly into the voids of his life, filled the empty, dark spaces that death had been determined to leave hollowed and scraped out within him.

An unmistakable shudder passes through Sansa’s body and suddenly she’s trembling, her body shaking with sobs unleashed from the depths of her, her chest sucking in short, shallow breaths. “I need you here—Jon please, I can’t—”

“Shh, it’s alright,” he hums against her hair, tightening the hold of his arms around her. “I’m here now. I’ve got you.” The trembles that wrack her body may not affect his own body the same, but inside he feels the same terror she does, trying to claw its way up his throat and come to light.

He needs her too, he thinks, and the thought nearly steals his breath away. Nearly cuts through him much like a sword pierces through the skin. Through the window, the sky turns a brilliant shade of pink weaved with threads of orange, as the sun begins to make its descent behind the hills of Winterfell, painting the room in golden hues and highlighting the copper in Sansa’s hair. He has no way of knowing how much time has passed, from when he first sat beside her bed to where they lay now, but the reassurances he whispers into her hair last long into the night, even after her sobs slow to a trickle of tears and her breath leaves her in soft, steady exhales. 

“You’ll still go, won’t you?” she queries, the huff of her breath spreading a warmth across his chest, and he startles at the sensation, thinking her asleep. Her arm slips languidly around his waist, her fingers digging into the leather of his jerkin.

He pushes down the pang he feels in his stomach at how small her voice sounds, even in the quiet of the chamber.

“I meant what I said to you before,” Jon says into the dark, the room lit only by the few dimming candles that had been burning since earlier. His fingers trace light patterns against her back, feeling the raised ridges of skin through the cotton of her shift, and the memories that flicker through his mind cause a subtle undercurrent of rage to thrum through him. Memories of the feel of Ramsay’s broken flesh beneath his fist, of Sansa’s distressed voice pulling him from the brink when he had been unable to stop. “I’ll protect you, I promise. From Daenerys, from Cersei, from all of it—I will protect you.”

It had been a lie, the last time Jon had said it right before the battle for Winterfell. It was the only way he’d known to assuage her, as they’d screamed at each other in his tent, the fear of the knowledge of their impending deaths hanging over them like a noose in the wind. This time, the promise leaves his lips, as if it is a vow taken before the heart tree, sacred and unbreakable. This time, he’ll fall on his own sword, if it means fulfilling this one duty. 

Dragon blood may run through his veins now, but he’s still determined to be every bit the Stark that he’s spent his whole life fighting to be. 

“We would have called him Robb,” she says faintly, almost as an afterthought, after they’ve slipped back into a comfortable silence. “In another life, he would have had inky black curls and Tully blue eyes and we would have named him Robb.”

He closes his eyes at the thought and the image burns brightly behind his eyelids. Images of a time where winter has passed, of an endless summer where the different roads they might have taken still lead them to this very castle, with the weight of her in his arms.

That ache between his ribs grows, twisting like a dagger and attempting to take the breath from his lungs. He swallows, his throat feeling tight. “I would have liked that.”

“Come back, Jon,” she says yearningly, pressing a light kiss to the hollow of his throat. Like he has already left, like she has already bid him goodbye in her heart and mind. “Come back with a crown, without a crown, come back with nothing, but just...come back to me, please.”

“Yours,” he breathes out, from the deepest parts of him in which she is rooted. “Until I return, the North is yours.”

The day the smoke and ash finally clear from the skies of Winterfell, the Dragon Queen sets sail for King’s Landing, Jon at her side and their entire Northern force at his back. Their goodbye is formal and chaste when he departs from the courtyard at the break of dawn, everything they’d needed to say to each other exchanged in the quiet of her chamber, on the day she’d lost the babe. Of course, there was still so much she could say, so much Jon could say before he leaves for the capital without the guarantee that he will return. 

There’s been so much left unsaid between them, they could fill tomes upon tomes in the Citadel with every unspoken word, every longing glance and every buried hurt. 

Sansa brings a hand to her stomach and presses it softly against the flat plane of her abdomen, gaze drifting out over the ramparts to the fields of Winterfell. Her world is split now, she realizes, into a definitive _before_ and a definitive _after._

Her and Jon rest somewhere in between, torn between reconciling the people they were then with the people they are now. Would the person she was before make the same choices she’s made now? Would the person she was from before be able to stomach the person she’s become?

(Would the person she was before love Jon just the same, if he’d stayed her brother after all?)

 _What if there’s someone else, someone better,_ she had asked Tyrion, just before he’d left to depart for the Kingsroad, a vehement desperation to her voice. There had been nothing left to lose in the moment, not as Jon and Arya had ridden through the gates of Winterfell for what could possibly be the last time, and Bran remained only a shell of the brother she’d had before.

She swallows back the guilt of sharing Jon’s secret, her throat tightening with the feeling. Some guilt we must live with, she finds. Some guilt has to stay a part of us, if it will make us better than the person we were before.

Winter is here, like her Father had always promised, and she doesn’t know if she will see Jon again before it is done. If she will see him ever again. But until then, she waits.

Much like the roots of the weirwood tree—

Constant and everlasting.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> big thanks to everyone who read and stuck w the story this far, any and all feedback is much appreciated!
> 
> title from nitesky by robert rock ft. john lamonica


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